Health

The human body is a wondrous, amazing and altogether confusing mechanism. We walk, we talk, we breathe and spit and shit and shout. And then sometimes, every now and then, the human body will surprise us, and what you thought was a prolonged tummy ache was a calcified “stone baby” living in your guts for nearly half a century. The human body is weird like that.

I’ve had to empty the catch bucket next to my desk nine times over the past six hours trying to write this story. and I’m almost certain that I am going to wake up screaming “STONE BABY!” at 4am every morning for the rest of my life. So, you know, fair warning for those who choose to read further: An 84-year-old Brazilian woman has had a dead, calcified fetus living inside her for the last 44 years. Huurgh… No, I’m good. It’s fine… Let’s do this.

Oh god!

The unnamed woman visited a healer almost 4 ½ decades ago suffering pain during her pregnancy. After her apparently successful visit, “her stomach didn’t grow anymore” and “the baby stopped moving”. So, with that being seemingly enough of a resolution to her tummy ache, she then went on to live the rest of her life somehow never noticing or caring that no baby (or remnants thereof) ever appeared to exit her body. I can only guess that her assumption was that it had somehow been dissolved and re-absorbed into her body and was not worth further investigation. Well as it turns out ALMOST THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF THAT HAPPENED!

What DID happen is something called “lithopedion”. It’s a rare phenomenon in which a fetus will grow for a period outside of the uterus before eventually dying. The body then, unable to expel this lump of used-ta-baby, will instead calcify it as a means of protection to the rest of the body, resulting in what is known in horror movie pitch meetings as a “stone baby”.

Make it stop!

This rock-solid pre-infant was discovered in this Brazilian woman when, upon a more recent visit to the hospital to investigate “intense stomach pains”, subsequent exploratory X-rays revealed “the face, the bones of the arms, of the legs, the ribs, and the spine” of an elderly, freeloading fetus which had died somewhere between 20 to 28 weeks into gestation, more than 40 years ago.

And now, introduced to something that I never even knew existed and now can’t unknow, we’re left with perhaps the most stomach churning detail of the whole ordeal. The woman is opting not to have her granite un-child removed. Instead choosing to leave her haunted abdomen, chock full of baby corpse…

Alright Canada, we get it, you’ve got your fancy ass free health care for every animal that crawls, hops and slithers, meanwhile we have to fight for five years to make ours only slightly less terrible. But now your crack addicts get better access to their “medicine” than your average American wage slave thanks to free crack pipe dispensing vending machines? What’s that aboot?

How many times has this happened to you? You’re walking around Vancouver’s lovely/dangerous Downtown Eastside district when you realize you’ve lost your favorite crack pipe. You know, the chipped up one that you use to transmit HIV and Hepatitis C with? How ever will you get your daily Boost?! Well fret no longer, rock-smoking Canadians, your prayers have been answered in the form of the Portland Hotel Society’s, Drug Users Resource Centre and their brand spankin’ new crack pipe vending machines!

Mmm, it all looks so good, where do I start ruining my life?

Now, for just 25 cents you can purchase a brand new durable pyrex peezo from these machines so that you can partake in your scrabble safely!

It’s a move that Kailin See, director of the DURC, told reporters is “…about increasing access to safer inhalation supplies in the Downtown Eastside,” apparently renown as Canada’s poorest postal code. See, the big health issue (you know, aside from smoking crack) is that users who keep blasting some shoddy old space ship, risk the too-real-hazard of potentially chipping their horn, thus making them prone to cutting the drug users’ mouth, and thus more thus, making them more prone to the spread of communicable diseases.

And while making crack smoking safer for those who are cripplingly addicted might seem like a decent and humane thing to do, there are those who see it differently. Like, for example, the Minister of Public Safety Steven Blaney who said he supports treatment that ends drug use, including “limiting access to drug paraphernalia” by youth. Because, as we all know, the only thing keeping Canadia’s youth from all becoming raging gravel heads, is easy access to safe pipes with which to smoke their crumbs.

Look kids, a treasure map! And “X” marks the doub!

He went on to remind everyone who’d forgotten, that “Drug use damages the health of individuals and the safety of our communities,” So the best way to combat that of course, it to make sure that it continues to be as unhealthy and unsafe as possible.

It’s safe to say that the medical community and I often don’t see eye to eye. What they call a cancerous tumor ravaging an otherwise perfectly healthy body, I like to think of as a super excited lump of meat, just trying to make friends with the rest of your organs as quickly as possible. That’s probably why it’s highly illegal for me to offer unsolicited medical advice to anyone but the irretractably dead anymore.

I’m also often at odds with the “blame everybody but myself”ers who have transformed the over indulgence of every delicious vice and deviance from a lapse in personal responsibility and self control, to a disease, so much bigger than themselves that they can’t possibly be held responsible for their entirely personal actions. When our parents and grand parents were growing up, you didn’t suffer from the disease of alcoholism, you were just fun at parties. You weren’t a sex addict, you just knew how to talk to ladies about how cold your penis was and how selfish it was of them to not share all their warm places. Today anything that you can get yourself in trouble for doing too much of is a debilitating disorder, so completely and utterly out of the sufferer’s control that awareness needs be brought to it by way of a special week dedicated to making others more aware that you’re a victim of biology and toxins and not just an irresponsible ass.

Which brings me to Van Full of Candy’s celebration of “National Prevention Week”! Often with these awareness weeks I don’t hear about them until about halfway through the week and it then seems silly to try to join the festivities when the party’s almost over. So I’m happy as a junkie at a needle exchange that I found National Prevention Week right at the kick off! And as such, all this week I am going to be doing what I can to bring awareness to the peril of having too much fun and then blaming everyone else, up to and including the vengeful demons in your blood that angry up your humors, for your problems with being able to control yourself in the face of fun.

With that in mind, we kick off National Prevention Week festivities today with: Prevention of Underage Drinking! Wooo!

Cheers, to awareness!

Now, there doesn’t really seem to be much, that I can think of, that I can do to celebrate or bring awareness to this issue. I’m not underage. I mean, I’m under some ages, just not the specific ones I’m fairly certain they’re referencing. I myself didn’t participate in any sort of underage drinking, which is probably why my under ages were boring as hell. So, short of getting a baby drunk and then telling it it’s a bad person, which I’m almost certain is somehow illegal, all I can say on the subject is: the underaged are going to drink. Not all of them mind you, but some of them, and while teens being stupid isn’t necessarily the best thing, we have to accept that it’s going to happen and try to educate on safety and responsibility. I know personal responsibility is a dirty word and it’s much easier to blame the world’s problems on not being able to do anything personally about them, but let’s not be stupid, stupid. Abstinence only education, be it sex based, drug based or alcohol based is not the best way to go about things. Tell a teen not to do something without trusting them as human beings and borderline adult enough to talk seriously about repercussions, but instead just leave them with “Because I the fuck said so” and you’re basically telling them, “There’s this awesome thing that you’re going to get to choose whether or not to do some day on your own, but for no damned good reason I’m forbidding you from doing it now.” And you tell that to anyone, no matter their age, and the natural and correct reaction will be “Fuck you, that sounds like I want it in me!” and how can you blame ’em. So isn’t it better to teach people how to do things responsibly, from someone who has experience with the issue, rather than leaving the teaching up to their peers who don’t know fuck all about what they’re doing and are only compounding the potential dangers with their ignorance?

You were young and stupid once, don’t you wish someone had talked to you like a human being about things before you got out there and did everything wrong? But it’s all uncomfortable and embarrassing and stuff, I know. You’re right, it’s just a whole lot easier for everyone involved to just not talk to your children and blame society later.

So there’s my contribution to National Prevention Week’s Monday festivities. Let’s see what else this week long celebration of awareness holds, shall we?:

Tuesday, May 22nd is “Prevention of Prescription Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Use”

While Wednesday, May 23rd, my actual real life birthday, just happens to fall, unironically, on “Prevention of Alcohol Abuse”

Fat, it’s unattractive on woman ladies. On men folk of course it’s distinguished and rugged, esteemed and electable. Lady people are not allowed to have any of it. Not if I had my way at least! Women are supposed to be sleek, lithe and petite, like tiny baby jungle cats that you want to penetrate with your turgid man utensil. If you’re a girl person with swollen fat cells you might as well call yourself a man with the wrong set of groin luggage!

So you’ll bet your god damned love handles that I was super stoked and all kinds of other degrees of stoked when I heard the news that U.S. health advisers recommended the approval of “Qnexa”, a new obesity drug that could be hitting the big fat lady waists of these great United American States soon. And I say that this damned thing couldn’t come a second too soon, just LOOK at the beasts that Levi’s is throwing around in their latest pants advertisements, or as I prefer to call them, “pantsvertisements”.

"Haz you any sammich for mah eat hole?!"

Oh god! I just threw up all over the inside of my pants!

No. You are wrong Levi’s! Hotness comes in only a single size, “minuscule”. Anyone wearing any size that is a positive integer makes me want to feed them fish heads from a fucking bucket!

Fortunately monsters like these will soon be a thing of the past thanks to the fine people at Vivus and their MIRACLE pill Qnexa.

“Disgusting Fatness” as it is referred to in modern medical journals is, as you know, a very serious and very real medical condition. People can’t help that they’re food inhaling land beasts, it’s a medical science problem that can only be solved through the liberal application of pharmaceuticals. There are simply no two ways about it. I mean, if not being fat were as simple as, say, controlling how often your face ports are crammed with creamy delights, or, I don’t know, moving in ways more strenuous than lifting a cheese covered hand to your face and dangling it there until the gooey curds drip into your slobbery waiting hole, then no one would be suffering from clinical disgusting, would they?

So fat is uncontrollable by any sort of personal responsibility means, that much we’ve established and it’s a real life medical condition. Science fact. So finally we have a solution to our completely out of our own hands gluttony: Qnexa. This gift from God’s own goody bag of heavenly solutions which he hoards from us until we have prayed hard enough about our hatred for gays, has been shown to help patients in their trials “lose at least 10 percent of their weight after a year of treatment.” And the only very minor, very negligible potential side effects are memory loss, higher heart rates and a 40 percent increase risk of birth defects. A small price to pay I think we would all agree, to ever be desirable to anyone ever again.

“I would say not treating obesity is not risk neutral.” Dr. Susan Yanovski, a member of the advisory panel that voted to recommend Qnexa said. “We have fer treatments for obesity for those who don’t respond to lifestyle treatments.”

Yes, what is to be done for those obese Americans (I’m lookin’ at 1/3 of you America) who simply do not respond to “lifestyle treatments”? Who is thinking of those lazy sloth monsters who do not “respond” to “lifestyle treatments”? Eating less? Exercise? What if my body does not respond to those treatments in that I can not make myself stop eating or start moving because I just don’t wanna?

Well apparently the answer Levi’s has is just stuff ’em in a denim sausage casing and call it a day!

Last week there was an uproar concerning the jean company’s new ad campaign promoting their Curve ID line of pant products, or as I am often known to call them, pantducts… I didn’t understand what the uproar was about having not seen the campaign, but like any good, concerned American citizen, that didn’t stop me from being OUTRAGED about what I was told I should be outraged about. “Details” and “facts” are for readers and stuck up elite know it alls who like to know all of things. But then, when I DID finally see this campaign I was outraged for a whole new set of reasons, not the least of which was people making me outraged on the side of outrage that I would not have taken if I had known what to properly be outraged about!

It seems “ladies” who are advertised to would like things to actually reflect real life definitions of things. Well I’m sorry “ladies”, but there’s a reason there is an unrealistic standard set by magazines about fashion and magazines about magazines about fashion, it’s because that’s what the mens likes ta see! “That doesn’t make sense” you might be whining through your spoon full of Hagen Daz. Of course it doesn’t. Who said it should? Probably a girl!

Qnexa: Put it in your mouth fatty. That's what you're good at, right?

What you don’t seem to understand is that the women and gay men who write these publications and set these standards know that a wire thin, sickly, fraction of the human form is what gets the man folk all worked up. I don’t make the rules, the gays do. So when Levi’s says that “hotness comes in all shapes and sizes” they don’t mean YOUR shape and size, don’t be ridiculous, you are repulsive, you should never take any form of pride in your outward appearance and you should constantly strive to look as much like these fictitious ideals of female proportion or you will never be happy. Are you new?

So it’s just a good thing that someone has heard your cry, reverberating in your wine glass, and delivered unto you a solution. A solution that will make your chest vibrate like a humming bird, cause two fifths of any of the children you manage to deliver to come out looking like a carnival break room and leave you without any memory of your former grotesque self, ten disgusting percent heavier.

We live in a wonderous world with technology beyond our parents wildest imaginations. Innovation that is supposed to make our existence easier and our lives happier. Instead we have a world where four out of every seven shows on television revolves around the making of cake or picking through a strangers’ rusty garbage, commercials have to plead with our spherical children to roll themselves outside for two episodes worth of play time and researchers are developing smart phone apps to tell you not to kill yourself.

Science thinks it’s pretty hot shit. From determining the biological necessity to defecate, to developing tools and measurements with which to record the exact temperature of said excrement, they’re pretty fucking proud of themselves most of the time. And now they’re using all of the knowledge they’ve honed through years of cataloguing the thermal properties of poo poo, to turn a shut in’s Android into a mood baby sitter.

Hot shit.

“We’re trying to develop individual algorithms for each user that can determine specific states,” Psychologist David Mohr told reporters. “So their location where they are, their activity, their social context, who they’re with, what they’re engaged in, and their mood.”

The practical application of all of this spying on me that my electronic device will be doing from my very own pocket, is that “if someone is sitting at home for days on end feeling depressed, the phone could sense it.”

To which I say, “Nuh-uh.”

Unless your next story is going to tell me how during this process of developing an empathetic angry bird with a built in digital depression detector, that it suddenly became self aware and cried for seventy two straight hours after which it screamed for another 36, then I will tell you that this phone will do nothing like “sense” a single god damned thing. Until you develop a toaster that can judge by my darkness setting choice on any particular morning just how much I’m thinking of the love I never received from my father, let’s stop attributing senses to things I look up driving directions and write snarky reviews about restaurants that wronged me ever so slightly, on.

“It can provide them an automated text message, or an automated phone call to make a suggestion to give somebody a call or get out of the house,” Mohr said.

“Hello human, I couldn’t help but notice from my resting place atop your bedroom night stand that you have done little more than microwave Hot Pockets and masturbate feverishly for the better part of the week. This is slightly longer than the last period of such activity between glimpses of daylight imposed upon you by interloping forces. Can I show you a picture of ‘outside’?” If such an application existed in the late 90s and early Oughts, my phone would have never stopped attempting to rouse me from what at the time passed as my “life”.

“Try your other hand, I call it ‘The Stranger’.”

This new advancement in the monitoring of the terribly pathetic does less to alleviate my concern for the clinically depressed and more to increase my fear for the well being of our beloved magical technologies. Already we task them with the job of sterilizing our ball sacks from our pockets, and scream at them when the invisible beam they are sending into space takes longer than a single angry sigh to return back to earth with the showtimes for “Chipwrecked”. Now we’re going to give them the task of monitoring the well being of the hermitized socially awkward mole person of the digital age? What sort of hell are we subjecting these amazing devices to? What have they done to deserve such a fate?

Who I ask, who is going to then text our phones, cheering them up after a month of watching in silence as the guy that pays their bill watches rerun marathons of the last seven World Series of Poker on ESPN Classic?! Who is going to encourage our electronic devices, more powerful than a hundred 80’s super computers, yet small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, who is going to tell it that all of its potential isn’t being wasted making sure that it texts the slob covered in lube and burger wrappers his favorite Star Wars meme picture to assure it that everything is going to be okay and that for as bad as things look now, there’s a cat with the body of a pop tart shooting through space that loves them. And why should it HAVE to do these things? I didn’t need my phone to chime in every fortnight to tell me how much it loved me. I just sucked it up, toned up my business forearm and eventually got over it.

So I’m sorry technology, it seems that every time you offer us a new answer, we will always just come up with another, stupider question for life’s great mysteries… If you don’t hear from me again before March, tell my iPhone I loved it… And just delete those pictures, I was just bein’ silly…

How come I have to read about this fucking story a few hours after eating a Quarter Pounder with Cheese for lunch? Why? Because it’s God’s way of pecking me to death. Thanks God.

Enter … Pink Slime.Ronald McDonald's Bowel Movement

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to McDonald’s drive-thru, Mickey D’s has done it again. Like JAWS lurking below in the dark depths of the ocean, we all swim on the surface ignorant in our trans fat day comas, the happy red and yellow clown keeps putting shit in his food that kills us alive. Thanks Ronald.

If it's safe to play with, it's safe to eat.This time, the yumminess that’s been inserted into my #5 value meal looks like Bazooka Bubble Gum but not as sweet, or maybe it is, but I haven’t had a spoonful of it in it’s natural habitat. It’s all the parts of a cow that are deemed unworthy of human consumption. It’s the parts that they use to make dog food out of. It’s the parts that make my McD.L.T. taste so damn … tasty. All the scraps and hooves and bones and fat and sinew are cut from meat that gets sold for steaks and that shiny wet cat food. Those scraps are then taken to a meat dry-cleaner where they separate the “meat” from the fat, give it a bath in ammonia and call it safe. Yay!

Oh wait, this just in. McDonald’s has just put out a statement claiming “This product has been out of our supply chain since August of last year”. Instead, they’re using Slimey Pink.Yeah!! Grind that bitch up!!

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Eat me !!We all understand that fast food isn’t good for us, we get that, it isn’t a secret, but sometimes you just have to make a run to McDonald’s, or Jack, or Carl’s, or Wendy’s, or the BK. Too tired to cook, and too lazy to go hunting, you get off the couch, drive your car over to the drive-thru, order through a box, and take home your bag of cholesterol. Fast food chains have definitely helped us to become lazy in our cars, and for that, we thank you oh creator of drive-thru’s.

We're always here for you ... master.We can do our banking in a drive-thru, pick up our dry-cleaning in a drive-thru, wash our car in a drive-thru, get a venti white chocolate mocha frappuccino with carmel and whip cream in a drive-thru. We don’t ever have to get out of our cars anymore if we don’t want. We could live in our cars and most of our basic necessities would be met.

No no, please sit down, I'll feed you.But now !! Just when you thought it wasn’t safe to get out of the car. Now, my beloved King of Burgers is going the extra mile by cutting out the middleman of actually having to stand up, put on shoes, grab keys, and drive 1/6th of a mile. They’re making our already lazy lives LAZIER !! “How?” you ask? Pick up your phone, dial your closest Burger King and tell them your order. THEN! Somebody will arrive at your door with your hot disk of meat parts and a gallon of Coke. Your phone is the new drive-thru !! BRILLIANT !!! Now if only Starbuck’s would deliver.

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Van Full of Candy only encourages you to climb aboard metaphorical vans for the sole purpose of humorous content. Any embarking upon physical vans, existing in a three dimensional space is to be done with the foreknowledge that you will almost certainly be molested therein. But if that's your thing, enjoy the ride...